Most performance marketing strategies feature paid services like search engine marketing (SEM) and social media advertising. But marketers often exclude organic services like search engine optimization (SEO) from performance marketing. While SEO is clearly different than performance marketing, SEO can and should function alongside performance marketing strategies.
What Is SEO?
SEO is the process of updating your website, as well as other business properties like Google Business, to increase visibility in organic search engine results. The goal of SEO is for your website to show up when and where your target audience searches.
SEO strategies generally include services such as keyword research, technical website optimization, on-page website optimization, content optimization, and local SEO.
What Is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing is a strategy by which you only pay for digital marketing services when they result in specific goals. For example, with a performance SEM campaign, you pay when somebody clicks on the ad – not whenever the ad appears in search results. The goal of performance marketing is to increase metrics like clicks, leads, and sales.
Common performance marketing channels are SEM, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and email marketing.
Differences Between SEO and Performance Marketing
Most digital marketing separate SEO and performance marketing. Each has different goals, timeframes, marketing funnel applications, and return on investment (ROI) calculations.
Short-Term vs Long-Term Digital Marketing Goals
Performance marketing campaigns have short-term objectives. The idea is to generate a specific number of clicks or leads every month. SEO, however, has a longer-term focus. Rather than focusing on the next month, the best SEO strategies prioritize increased keyword visibility and organic traffic throughout the year.
SEO Is More Sustainable than Performance Marketing
Given its longer-term focus, SEO is more sustainable than performance marketing. Optimizing on-page content or fixing technical website errors in September can improve performance in September, October, November, and so on. On the other hand, performance marketing is not as sustainable because of its “pay-to-play” model. If you pay $1,000 for 100 clicks in September, you will almost certainly need to pay $1,000 for another 100 clicks in October.
Marketing Funnel Applications for SEO and Performance Marketing
Like all marketing activities, SEO and performance marketing play roles in the traditional marketing funnel. That said, their respective roles are at different stages of the funnel. SEO is more useful higher up in the marketing funnel because it generates awareness and increases visibility. At these stages, the audience seeks information and is not quite ready to convert. Performance marketing occurs lower in the funnel when the audience is closer to conversion.
Measurable Performance and Direct ROI with Performance Marketing
Digital marketers love performance marketing because it is totally transparent and measurable. You can see exact values for spend, impressions, clicks, leads, and even sales. As such, performance marketing campaigns show direct ROI. For the most part, SEO strategies are not as measurable. While you can measure keyword rankings and organic traffic, it is nearly impossible to connect these to specific SEO activities.
Similarities Between SEO and Performance Marketing
While SEO and performance marketing represent different activities, they share important similarities. SEO and performance marketing involve the same digital metrics, and they also function in platforms such as Google and Meta.
Digital Marketing Metrics Are the Same
Performance marketing and SEO share the same core set of digital marketing metrics. Key performance metrics include impressions, clicks, and click-through rate. The application of these metrics is different (impressions, for example, are more relevant to SEO than performance marketing), but the calculations and analysis remain pretty much the same.
Ultimate Marketing Goal Is Increased Leads
The ultimate goal of performance marketing is to drive leads. You can pay for leads directly or pay for clicks that potentially become leads. SEO lead performance is not as direct, but increased leads are the ultimate goal for SEO as well. The whole point of improving keyword visibility and traffic is so they can increase leads somewhere down the line – even if this increase is more difficult to measure.
Performance Marketing and SEO and Digital Marketing Channels
SEO and performance marketing both are digital marketing strategies. This means that they function in the same digital platforms. Google search results pages include ads (performance marketing), affiliate sites (performance marketing), local listings (SEO) and business websites (SEO). Social media platforms like Meta contain performance marketing and SEO listings as well.
How SEO Can Help Performance Marketing
SEO is not included in any performance marketing campaign – but quality SEO services can still improve performance marketing.
SEO Can Improve Brand Visibility
Performance marketing is all about driving clicks and leads from an audience that already knows your business (to a certain extent). But what about people who have yet to encounter your business? SEO can act as a branding tool and fill in these gaps with performance marketing. Publishing optimized blog content or updating your Google Business listing are good ways to get your business name in front of your audience.
SEO Can Increase Flow into Marketing Funnel
As a branding tool, SEO can increase flow into and even through the marketing funnel. Effective SEO can increase the number of people who make their way to the later stages of the funnel. This results in a larger and more engaged audience for your performance marketing campaigns. A larger audience means more impressions, more clicks, and more leads.
More Efficient Keyword Spending with SEO
Performance SEM and social media campaigns target branded and nonbranded search terms. Nonbranded search terms are generally more competitive and therefore more expensive than branded. What if you targeted some of these expensive nonbranded terms with SEO? Then you would have more budget with your performance marketing campaigns to spend on the most valuable nonbranded terms.
CloudControlMedia (CCM) offers a full suite of performance marketing services like SEM, programmatic advertising, social media advertising, and email marketing. We bolster our performance marketing services with SEO and content marketing.
Contact us today to further explore our services.
By Joseph Colarusso, Director of SEO Services